Quote

So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

Mary Oliver

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mary Oliver
Age: 83 †
Born: 1935
Born: September 10
Died: 2019
Died: January 17
Climate Activist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Maple Heights
Ohio
Mary Jane Oliver
Judging
Outwards
Inward
Swim
Pray
Praying
Flow

More quotes by Mary Oliver

Image
Love, love, love, says Percy. And hurry as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust.
Mary Oliver
Image
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
Mary Oliver
Image
You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.
Mary Oliver
Image
You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.
Mary Oliver
Image
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver
Image
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
Mary Oliver
Image
The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don't say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person's character shines or glooms.
Mary Oliver
Image
If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
Mary Oliver
Image
Attention is the beginning of devotion.
Mary Oliver
Image
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
Mary Oliver
Image
A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.
Mary Oliver
Image
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Mary Oliver
Image
Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket you put your life into it and make something out of that.
Mary Oliver
Image
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
Mary Oliver
Image
I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
Mary Oliver
Image
And over one more set of hills, along the sea, the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness and are giving it back to the world. If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness.
Mary Oliver
Image
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Mary Oliver
Image
I worked privately, and sometimes I feel that might be better for poets than the kind of social workshop gathering. My school was the great poets: I read, and I read, and I read.
Mary Oliver
Image
Poetry is a serious business literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
Mary Oliver
Image
I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it.
Mary Oliver